Top Shops: Designing a Shop to Meet Customer Needs

What makes a good business strategy, let alone one good enough to set a shop apart from even other Top Shops? Mitotec Precision CEO Clinton Pouillie’s answer was simple enough: “Having the same values in how we deal with our customers and our employees . . . I think that makes us special.”

The 2024 Top Shops Honoree for Business Strategies, Mitotec began operations in 1963, in the small town of Necedah, Wisconsin. The shop currently has 90 employees across three shifts staffing four-axis vertical mills, multi-spindle machines, multi-axis CNC lathes, Swiss-style turning machines and a suite of screw machines with both single- and multi-spindle setups.

Over the years, Mitotec has built a reputation for producing complex parts and quick turnarounds beyond what many shops can achieve. To do so, management has consciously fostered an internal culture of respect and reward to encourage innovation. It also plans its investments while keeping in mind the need to ramp up capacity on a dime. 

Multi-Spindle Scaling

For Mitotec, flexibility is key to success when it comes to taking on “hot” jobs with tight deadlines. Rather than simply upending their schedule and expecting the shopfloor workers to adjust, the company instead has capacity set aside for jobs with quick turnarounds. This includes multiple eight-spindle machines that are there for hot jobs with large production batches.

Those multi-spindle machines enable the shop to instantly increase its production levels for a job with a difficult lead time. Normally, the machines function at well below their maximal output, but when a job with a tight lead time comes in Mitotec can prepare it for one of these machines and achieve much shorter lead times than would be possible on other lathes. This strategy has proven effective enough that Mitotec is currently looking at buying another multi-spindle machine to maintain that extra capacity for quick turnarounds. 

The multi-spindle machines have further uses in enabling the shop to scale up production quickly. In one instance, a customer had placed an order that required 1,000 parts every six months. “Well, demand for that part increased, so we were doing about 1,000 pieces a month,” Clinton says. “That’s doable. We just needed to move it to a new machine and make some process improvements. Well, now it’s increased to 100,000 pieces a year.” By moving it to a multi-spindle machine that had been purchased to increase their flexibility, the company was able to quickly scale up production without forcing the customer to wait while they purchased the capital equipment to increase their capacity.

The shop’s flexibility goes beyond its machines, too. “We always try to go the extra mile,” Clinton says, and sometimes this becomes literal. In one illustrative example, Mitotec had a medical device customer who was running up on deadlines. “It was really no fault of anybody’s, just added demand,” Clinton says. After performing the necessary operations, the customer needed to inspect the part before it shipped, “And it needed to ship yesterday.” Clinton and a quality engineer grabbed the part and drove it down themselves. “We actually ended up calling an Uber, and we Ubered him up from Chicago and met him halfway to do some product certification.” The customer recertified the part in the parking lot, and the Mitotec team boxed it up and took it to UPS for next-day shipping to arrive on a Saturday morning, on time. Clinton downplays the effort, saying, “It’s just some little things that we do for our customers, you know?”

Building Relationships with Customers

Beyond manufacturing flexibility and a willingness to certify parts in parking lots when the need arises, Mitotec manages its workload of complex parts by acting as a partner to its customers even beyond the machining phase.

“We try really hard to have a multi-level relationship with our customers,” Sales Manager Warren Schoenborn says. “So, if customer service is talking to purchasing, and that is the bulk of the relationship, our engineering manager wouldn’t know about potential redesigns and what the customer is thinking about in the future.” Maintaining these relationships takes work. “It’s not unusual for us to have quarterly meetings with the CEO of some customers, and for Clinton to be involved,” Schoenborn continues. “This helps us anticipate what their needs will be down the line.”

Anticipating customer needs has a real effect on lead times, such as when Mitotec helped a customer redesign an assembly. “I had a little bit of forethought on one of the parts going into this assembly, which might have to change depending on testing,” says Engineering Manager Adam Pouillie. He had a machinist prepare blanks for this part to enable them to add whatever features their customers wanted and get a quick turnaround on iterating versions of that piece of the assembly. “If we had given them a longer lead time, it would have jeopardized that product getting out the door on time.”

Providing assistance on designing or redesigning for manufacturing is actually a task Mitotec takes on fairly often. “Our customers know what they want in a design, but they’re not machinists,” Clinton says. “They don’t need to be machinists — that’s our job.” In one instance, the engineering team worked extensively with a customer on a part for a promotional giveaway. “They knew they wanted to redesign this promo,” Adam says. “Working with them, we went through a couple design changes to drive down the cost, but still satisfy their requirements for performance.” Though it took time to get the design where it needed to be, Adam’s engineering team could quickly prototype and iterate on the design. This positioned Mitotec to ultimately produce the final version with about a month to complete the order.

This multi-level relationship is key to Mitotec’s success. By assisting customers in designing products, the engineering team showcases the shop’s manufacturing capabilities to the customer, advertising through competence. Customers understand Mitotec’s capabilities and dependability, and the management team’s continuous contact enables the shop to identify projects well ahead of time, encouraging customers to depend on Mitotec for its quick turnarounds. Each success builds the foundation for further success.

Building Relationships With Employees

Schoenborn stresses that achieving this level of flexibility comes not from making demands of employees, but from working with them. “It's not Clinton as our CEO or Adam as our engineering manager trying to force others to get it done,” he says. “Our team management leads by example, and our employees really grasp that and jump onto opportunities to help our customers out.”

In addition to occasionally driving a part to a makeshift QA inspection in a parking lot, management also actively does its part to turn demanding tasks into achievable goals. It was during of this process that management identified multi-spindle machines as an investment which could enable them to increase capacity at the drop of a hat, and by making these types of investments the management team keeps the strain of meeting tight deadlines from falling squarely on their employees.

To guide their own example, management relies on what it calls the five core values: be adaptable, be creative, be reliable, be thorough, be driven. Following these values, the Pouillies try to create an atmosphere in which their teams feel empowered to think of novel solutions to problems, while still ensuring that they will produce parts that meet the requirements of the job, on time. “One thing we stress is not giving no for an answer,” Clinton says. “If there’s a challenge, we don’t say no. We say, ‘What do we need to get this done?’ and go from there.”

“It’s very rare for me to just go to Adam and say, ‘I need X,’” Clinton continues. “It’s much more common for us to sit at the table with the rest of our leadership and talk about X opportunity.” And the employees feel this support. Management rewards creativity and initiative from employees by celebrating wins publicly every quarter. “We’ve got a fantastic success-sharing program,” Clinton says. “We want people to know that whatever their role is, they affect the final process, they affect the customer.”

And celebrating success isn’t just about praise, as the company also uses a profit-sharing program to increase worker investment in the company’s success. “We want to celebrate success, but also reward success,” Clinton says.

And the company’s willingness to build relationships extends to the community itself. Mitotec works closely with schools to introduce students to manufacturing careers early. “We have small schools in the area, and we give tours to students as young as fifth or sixth grade,” Clinton says. “And we work with tech schools to help develop curriculum or show what can be done with technology.” By weaving the business into the community, Clinton strengthens both the community and his business by increasing the perception of manufacturing as a viable path for young people. “We happen to love machining, but within manufacturing there are all kinds of career paths, and we try to stress that.” 

What Makes a Top Shop?

What makes Mitotec a Top Shop? It seems to me that it is a commitment to intentionality over anything else. Management wants to be able to take hot jobs, so they invest in the capacity to handle them. They want customers to keep them in mind for difficult projects, so the engineering team connects with customers’ design teams. They want quality candidates for job openings, so they work with local schools to introduce kids to machining. They want employees to feel committed to the success of the business, so they began a profit-sharing program and celebrate employee wins. Each action is in direct furtherance of their goals, and thus feeds their success.

Plenty of shops leap at the chance to take hot jobs, but if they have not prepared their team to pivot, then the disruption on-the-spot additions to the schedule cause can spill over into other work. Lead times can drag, and worker dissatisfaction can grow alongside customer dissatisfaction. By looking clear-eyed at the challenges created by taking on difficult tasks under harsh time constraints, Mitotec prepares its teams for success and makes challenging jobs achievable.